Turkey FM accuses PUK, Gorran of supporting PKK

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Tuesday charged two parties in the Kurdistan Region of aiding the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that is fighting his government for Kurdish rights.

“PKK has been supported by a group within Talabani’s party [PUK] and Gorran Movement. Thanks to their support it came down into the city of Sulaimani,” Cavusoglu told reporters according to the state media.

The late Kurdish leader and former President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, founded the PUK, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Gorran is an opposition party that splintered from it.

The Turkish FM claimed a PUK member minister in the Kurdistan Region’s government told him that “a small faction” of his party was backing the PKK, a group Ankara and its Western allies label as “terrorist.”

Cavusoglu’s comments came after a trip to Washington where he met with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the hope of pressuring Americans to stop supporting Syrian Kurds and make sure they withdraw from the town of Manbij.

PKK, headquartered in the mountainous regions bordering Iran and Turkey, was in conflict with other Kurdish parties, including the PUK and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) at different times at the height of the Kurdish civil war in the 1990s.

During much of the war against the Islamic State (IS) throughout 2014 to 2016, PKK fighters and Peshmerga forces fought together to drive the Islamist group from Kurdish lands.

However, they maintain uneasy relations today due to Turkish attacks and invasion of the Kurdistan Region’s territory which prompts the KDP-led Erbil government to urge the PKK to leave.

The Turkish army has stepped up an incursion as deep as 26 kilometers (16 miles) into Kurdistan as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ministers threaten a full assault on PKK bases in Qandil mountains ahead of elections this month in Turkey.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany